The Future of Search is Verbs
Lynette, Flickr, September 22, 2010.

This post has been lurking at the back of my mind for a little while now, and I may as well let some of it (and the link) bubble to the surface. First, the bit from the post: "when people search, they aren't just looking for nouns or information; they are looking for action. They want to book a flight, reserve a table, buy a product, cure a hangover, take a class, fix a leak, resolve an argument, or occasionally find a person." That's not quite true - the search I just conducted, for example, was to find a blog post I had read earlier. But then again, I wanted to create this newsletter entry. So there's a bit of point of view about it.

Now for the surfacing of the bubble. I've had two intertwined threads running through my head all week, both related to this point:
- first, that we have no basis for the discipline of 'education', that is, no entities that we all agree we are studying, no base reference against which we can evaluate educational theory
- second, we have been defining learning according to what is to be learned (learning objectives, outcomes, competencies, knowledge, facts, etc.) while what learners in fact want is not to learn per se but rather to do

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Experimenting With Client Certificates
Ben Laurie, Links, September 22, 2010.

Some links and brief discussion about something called WebID. It's based on client certificates, writes Ben Laurie, a concept that has been appealing but rendered useless by browser user interfaces. But WebID gets around this by being coded entirely in Javascript. "I would hope that it would migrate to be part of the browser, it seems pretty clear that doing this on the webpage is not likely to lead to a secure solution in the long run." OK, it's a very early implementation, but it's out of things like this that we get actual innovation.

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Education and the Social Web. Connective Learning and the Commercial Imperative
Norm Friesen, Website, September 22, 2010.

Norm Friesen challenges the combination of web 2.0 and education. "commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users ('eyeballs') with advertisers; it is not the autonomous individual learner, but collective corporate interests that occupy the centre of these networks." The design of content provisioned on those networks, he argues, detracts from educational purposes. Moreover, the selection of content privileges advertisers. Just as commercialism made television useless for learning, so also commercialism will render the web useless. "It is important to consider the complex and subtle but very effective ways in which advertisers' interests shape online social contexts." If e-learning in social networks depended on Twitter and Facebook, I would agree with Friesen. But the direction of work has been away from those platforms, and more toward non-commercial alternatives.

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Institutions and the Web done better
Paul Walk, Weblog, September 22, 2010.

If you can wrap your mind around the challenge of moving "from document to data" then you'll have some idea of what may lay ahead for the web - and hence, for educational uses of the web. It's not the easiest thing to imagine. We are drawn, almost inextricably, toward a document-oriented way of thinking about content and information: not just books and essays, but forms, spreadsheets, certificates, policies, and pretty much anything else that constitutes a modern enterprise is thought of in terms of documents. In terms of bundles of one or more sheets (of paper). Data isn't like that. It doesn't rest in a document - it is fed (dynamically) into documents (which are now disposable). It's fluid, and micro-grained. And - on the web - it can be accessible anywhere.

Why is this crucial? It all goes to how we design what we're doing. "A traditional, well-designed website will be based on some sort of understood ‘information architecture', however simple. The idea of starting with important ‘entities' and making sure that they have sensible, managed and reliable identifiers is a somewhat newer approach, yet this is vital for the Web of data to function. The Web of data is, at one level, entirely about identifiers and how they link together." This is definitely how I want to work going forward - but first I have to fill a 'project document' to enable the process.

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Reusing eLearning material (OER) from other sources or not, asks UNESCO. Three reasons why I hesitate
Inge de Waard, Ignatia, September 22, 2010.

Prior to the upcoming COL-UNESCO discussion (see below) Ignatia asks the question, "why would I hesitate to reuse learning materials," and comes up with three reasons:
- quality assurance - are the materials worth searching for?
- applicability - do those resources apply to my learning needds, or my culture?
- quantity - filtering what is useful in an OER can be a large task

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Taking OER beyond the OER Community
Various Authors, UNESCO, September 22, 2010.

The Commonwealth of Learning - UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) project is launching a series of discussions starting tomorrow. Basic instructions are here. The first of the forums is here. You may want to read neil Butcher's opening discussion paper. He argues for "a need to place strong emphasis on institutional policy engagement, because, until reward systems are restructured, there is little prospect for persuading people to change their behaviour" regarding both sharing educational content and reusing it. Ironically, Butcher's PDF is encrypted, making it impossible to copy and paste (I had to type out the quotation manually). The general announcement and online subscription page is here.

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Facebook & privacy - research shows approaches that might help young people
Ewan McIntosh, edu.blogs.com, September 22, 2010.

What I like about this advice is that it cautions against using fear as a motivation for privacy management. "The main reason we heartily discourage young people from engaging with those they know they know is fear: fear of stalking, bullying or making friends with someone you've never met face to face... (danah boyd writes) 'The culture of fear tends to center on marginalized populations and is often used as a tool for continued oppression and as a mechanism for restricting access to public spaces and public discourse'."

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Facebook & privacy - research shows approaches that might help young people
Ewan McIntosh, edu.blogs.com, September 22, 2010.

What I like about this advice is that it cautions against using fear as a motivation for privacy management. "The main reason we heartily discourage young people from engaging with those they know they know is fear: fear of stalking, bullying or making friends with someone you've never met face to face... (danah boyd writes) 'The culture of fear tends to center on marginalized populations and is often used as a tool for continued oppression and as a mechanism for restricting access to public spaces and public discourse'."

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